Claude GELLÉE called LORRAIN
Chamagne c.1600/04 - Rome 1682
Biography
Aptly described by one scholar as ‘The first and greatest French artist to specialize in landscape painting’, Claude Gellée, more commonly known as Claude Lorrain, was born around 1600 in the village of Chamagne, south of Nancy in the Duchy of Lorraine in northeastern France. The most informative accounts of his life are the contemporary biographies written by Joachim von Sandrart and Filippo Baldinucci, although the two authors differ on the details of Claude’s boyhood and youth. After being orphaned at the age of twelve, he is thought to have arrived in Rome around 1617, and there may have found employment as a pastry cook before working as a servant in the household of the artist Agostino Tassi, who eventually took him on as an apprentice and taught him the techniques of painting. Between 1618 and 1620 Claude completed his training in Naples with the German landscape artist Goffredo (Gottfried) Wals, who had also been a pupil of Tassi. In 1623 he is recorded back with Tassi in Rome, but by 1625 had returned to Nancy, where he worked under the supervision of Lorrainese court painter Claude Deruet on the fresco decoration of the Carmelite church there. Towards the end of 1626 he was back in Rome, where he was to spend the remainder of his career. As Baldinucci records, ‘he settled and began to establish a reputation through the numerous paintings he executed for different local and foreign connoisseurs. He was commissioned by Cardinal Bentivoglio to execute two landscapes, which earned him a great deal of credit not only with this distinguished prelate but also with Pope Urban VIII, who saw them even before they were finished. From that time on, Bentivoglio, other cardinals and princes of all kinds began to frequent his studio.’ Claude’s earliest dated oil painting is from 1629, four years before he became a member of the Accademia di San Luca. At around the same time he was one of several artists charged with painting landscapes for the Buen Retiro Palace near Madrid, and began producing a number of landscape etchings.
Claude became known as a landscape painter and draughtsman, working extensively en plein-air in Rome and on sketching expeditions to the surrounding Campagna, notably at Tivoli and Subiaco. As Sandrart, who met and befriended the artist early in his career, and often accompanied him on such tours, recalled of Claude ‘He tried by every means to penetrate nature, lying in the fields’s secrets by all the means at his disposal, stretched out in the fields from dawn to dusk, so as to learn how to represent accurately daybreak, sunrise, sunset and the eventide.’ The popularity of his paintings led to forgeries and imitations of his works being produced as early as the middle of the 1630s, and it may have been in part to circumvent this that the artist began compiling a drawn record of all his finished canvases, compiled into an album known as the Liber Veritatis that was maintained until the end of his life. In 1643 he was named to the Congregazione dei Virtuosi al Pantheon, the exclusive Pontifical Academy of Fine Arts and Letters. At the height of his career, Claude counted numerous important patrons and collectors – including Popes Urban VIII and Clement IX, King Phillip IV of Spain, and Princes Camillo Pamphili and Lorenzo Onofrio Colonna – among his clients, and his paintings fetched high prices. He enjoyed a reputation as perhaps the most successful landscape painter in Europe, receiving commissions for easel pictures from collectors in Rome and throughout Italy, as well as from France, Germany, Spain and elsewhere. The artist died in Rome in November 1682 and was buried in his local church of SS. Trinità dei Monti. While he had very few pupils or studio assistants, Claude’s influence on landscape painting and drawing in Europe was significant and lasted into the 19th century.
Claude valued his drawings highly, rarely parting with them. The artist or his heirs seems to have assembled many of his drawings into albums, and the inventory of the contents of his studio after his death lists, alongside bundles of loose sheets, twelve ‘books of sketches’, although much of this material has since been dispersed. An album known as the Liber Veritatis, containing highly finished landscape drawings recording the composition of every painting the artist completed after around 1635, survives in the British Museum, while an album of sixty autonomous landscape drawings known as the ‘Wildenstein album’, assembled after Claude’s death by his heirs, was only broken up in the 1970s. Other sketchbooks or albums of drawings can be reconstructed on the basis of numbering or size, including one small album of animal studies and two others known as the ‘Tivoli sketchbook’ and the ‘Roman Campagna sketchbook’, each containing around sixty landscape drawings from nature done around 1640. Another sketchbook, containing landscapes, figure and animal sketches, was discovered in the early 1980s and is today in the Nationalmuseum in Stockholm. Claude seems to have kept almost all of his drawings in his studio until his death, and, despite the interest of contemporary collectors, only very rarely gave them away or sold them. Nevertheless, his drawings became well known for some time after his death since several hundred of them were reproduced in the form of mezzotint prints, by Richard Earlom and others, in the 18th and early 19th centuries.
Throughout his long career, the practice of drawing was of great importance to Claude, occupying a central role in his artistic process. Almost five times as many drawings as paintings by him are known, amounting to some 1,200 sheets, ranging from nature studies and compositional drawings to figure and animal studies and independent landscapes, as well as records of finished paintings. He was, as the Claude scholar Marcel Roethlisberger has written, ‘a born draftsman who, during his whole life, took an evident pleasure in producing his drawings...But all his drawings are at the same time much more than mere working stages for the paintings. From a purely functional point of view, most drawings reach beyond the target. They are works of art in their own right. Unlike the majority of the drawings by Carracci and even Poussin, there are hardly any sketchy or unfinished-looking drawings by Claude…A conscientious perfectionist in the design and execution of his paintings, he deployed the same effort and attention to the last of his sketches…The autonomy of Claude’s drawings derives from his profoundly pictorial vision, thanks to which every sketch became a little picture of its own.’
